Reading on the beach is a rite of summer as treasured as slathering on globs of coconut oil and squatting in front of a tanning mirror. Of course, five out of five dermatologists recommend that you read this special collection of book excerpts indoors — while wearing a biohazard suit with a beekeeper’s mask — but that’s where we decided to draw the line.

Besides sharing a homegrown quality, each of our four books was penned by an author with Boston-area roots — and flirts with danger.

In Larry’s Kidney, DANIEL ASA ROSE (PEN Fiction winner) tells the hilarious and quite true tale of how his mobbed-up cousin coerced him into going to China to help him hunt for a black-market organ and a mail-order bride.

In It Feels So Good When I Stop, JOE PERNICE (of local rock heroes the Pernice Brothers) pens an extraordinarily amusing novel whose protagonist escapes a one-day marriage and a drug-addled lifestyle to avoid drowning in slacker inertia.

In The Accidental Billionaires, BEN MEZRICH (author of Bringing Down the House) controversially blends fact and fiction to recreate the events that led to the founding of Facebook, revealing that computer programming has certain fringe benefits more akin to being in a hair-metal band.

And, most sobering, in The End of the Long Summer, acclaimed environmental reporter DIANNE DUMANOSKI offers a crystal-ball look into the future of our planet so isturbing that it will probably have you running back into the house for that biohazard suit and beekeeper’s mask.

Larry's Kidney In this nonfiction account pretty accurately described by the book's subtitle, Daniel Asa Rose accompanies his nebbishy but mobbed-up relative on a mission for a Chinese two-fer: to get the organ he desperately needs and — why not, as long as we're here? — a wife, to boot. In this excerpt, the author first hears about his cousin's dubious — and, according to Chinese law, illegal — plan.

The Accidental Billionaires In this nonfiction account of the Harvard origins of the social-networking phenomenon, the author boils down the essence of why Facebook — orginially called thefacebook — was created and the root of its power: nerds obsessing over sex. In this excerpt, undergrads Eduardo Saverin and Mark Zuckerberg begin to realize that Facebook is indeed their golden ticket.

Interview: Jesse Eisenberg and Woody Harrelson Vampires may have taken a bite out of the popular zeitgeist in the past couple of years, but the nearly $25 million in ticket sales that greeted the opening of Zombieland, as it shuffled into theaters this past weekend, just goes to prove that while flesh-eating ghouls might be (un)dead, you should never count them out.

Larry's Kidney In this nonfiction account pretty accurately described by the book's subtitle, Daniel Asa Rose accompanies his nebbishy but mobbed-up relative on a mission for a Chinese two-fer: to get the organ he desperately needs and — why not, as long as we're here? — a wife, to boot. In this excerpt, the author first hears about his cousin's dubious — and, according to Chinese law, illegal — plan.

The Accidental Billionaires In this nonfiction account of the Harvard origins of the social-networking phenomenon, the author boils down the essence of why Facebook — orginially called thefacebook — was created and the root of its power: nerds obsessing over sex. In this excerpt, undergrads Eduardo Saverin and Mark Zuckerberg begin to realize that Facebook is indeed their golden ticket.

Interview: Jesse Eisenberg and Woody Harrelson Vampires may have taken a bite out of the popular zeitgeist in the past couple of years, but the nearly $25 million in ticket sales that greeted the opening of Zombieland, as it shuffled into theaters this past weekend, just goes to prove that while flesh-eating ghouls might be (un)dead, you should never count them out.

The Night Circus The man billed as Prospero the Enchanter receives a fair amount of correspondence via the theater office, but this is the first envelope addressed to him that contains a suicide note, and it is also the first to arrive carefully pinned to the coat of a five-year-old girl.

What Portland’s creative types are reading for summer This summer, instead of listing the usual batch of hot summer books (you can find those anywhere), we asked a diverse and completely arbitrary group of Portland arts luminaries what was on their summer reading lists.

Endurance Reads Beach reading . The very phrase is abhorrent to book lovers, connoting as it does cheap paperbacks, tumescent with air-dried seawater and crunchy with sand, paragraph after paragraph of poorly written pulp meant to be read as fast as the passing of summer itself.

MICHAUD FOR GOVERNOR | November 03, 2014 However you’ve been following the race for Governor this election season, you’ve been hearing it from all sides, so we’ll make this one brief. We urge you to vote for Michael Michaud.

ADVANCED BEAUTY LESSONS | November 03, 2014 Described as a “body-positive visibility project,” Portland’s Jack Tar 207 is all about representation. Models are encouraged to bring their own clothing and personal belongings to the shoot, which owner-designer LK Weiss says brings out “a level of confidence that many people don’t feel in front of a camera.”

LITERALLY LGBT | October 31, 2014 A community-compiled list of important GBLTQ works through the years.

BACK TO REALITY | September 18, 2014 If you’re a student in southern Maine and are at all interested in arts and humanities, and have a budget of exactly $10 to spend on any one event, there’s a lot in your favor.